For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

Theodore Roethke -- “The Bat”

From the earliest times, bats have been viewed as creatures of mystery -- as
arcane and abstruse as the opaque shadows of Night that animate so many of their
kind. It is certainly true that during the past two centuries science has
succeeded in brushing aside many cobwebs of longstanding confusion and credulity
enveloping these winged wanderers, but there are a host of others still to be
dealt with. Indeed, as disclosed in this chapter, there are certain sources of
provocative (and scientifically inconvenient?) but little-known data on file
that not only question the validity of some fondly treasured tenets of
traditional bat biology, but also provide startling evidence for the existence
of several dramatic species of bat still awaiting formal zoological discovery.

THE AHOOL AND THE OLITIAU -- OR, HOW BIG IS A BAT?One evening in 1927, at around 11:30 p.m., naturalist Dr. Ernst Bartels
was in bed inside his thatched house close to the Tjidjenkol River in western
Java, and lay listening to the surrounding forest’s clamorous orchestra of
nocturnal insects. Suddenly, a very different sound came winging to his ears
from directly overhead -- a loud, clear, melodious cry that seemed to utter “A-hool!”
A few moments later, but now from many yards further on, the cry came again -- a
single “A-hool!” Bartels snatched his torch up and ran out, in the direction of
this distinctive sound. Less than 20 seconds later he heard it once more, for
the third and last time -- a final “A-hool!” that floated back towards him from
a considerable distance downstream. As he recalled many years later in a
detailed account of this and similar events (Fate, July 1966), he was
literally transfixed by what he had heard -- not because he didn’t know
what it was, but rather because he did!

The son of an eminent zoologist, Dr. Bartels had spent much of his
childhood in western Java, and counted many of the local Sundanese people there
as his close friends. Accordingly, he was privy to many strange legends and
secret beliefs that were rarely voiced in the presence of other Westerners.
Among these was the ardent native conviction that this region of the island
harbored an enormous form of bat. Some of Bartels’s Sundanese friends claimed to
have spied it on rare occasions, and the descriptions that they gave were
impressively consistent. Moreover, as he was later to discover, they also
tallied with those given by various Westerners who had reputedly encountered
this mysterious beast.

It was said to be the size of a one-year-old child; with gigantic wings spanning
11 to 12 feet; short, dark-grey fur; flattened forearms supporting its wings;
large, black eyes; and a monkey-like head, with a flattish, man-like face. It
was sometimes seen squatting on the forest floor, at which times its wings were
closed, pressed up against its flanks; and, of particular interest, its feet
appeared to point backwards. When Bartels questioned eyewitnesses as to its
lifestyle and feeding preferences, he learned that it was nocturnal, spending
the days concealed in caves located behind or beneath waterfalls, but at night
it would skim across rivers in search of large fishes upon which it fed,
scooping them from underneath stones on the beds of the rivers. At one time,
Bartels had suggested that perhaps the creature was not a bat but some type of
bird, possibly a very large owl, but these opinions were greeted with great
indignation and passionate denials by his friends, who assured him in no
uncertain terms that they were well able to distinguish a bat from a bird! And
as some were very experienced, famous hunters, he had little doubt concerning
their claims on this score.

Even so, the notion of a child-sized bat with a 12-foot wingspan seemed so
outrageous that he still had great difficulty in convincing himself that there
might be something more to it than native mythology and imagination -- until,
that is, the fateful evening arrived when he heard that unforgettable,
thrice-emitted cry, because one of the features concerning the giant bat that
all of his friends had stressed was that when flying over rivers in search of
fish this winged mystery beast sometimes gives voice to a penetrating,
unmistakable cry, one that can be best rendered as “A-hool! A-hool! A-hool!”

Indeed, the creature itself is referred to by the natives as the ahool, on
account of its readily recognizable call -- totally unlike that of any other
form of animal in Java, as Bartels himself was well aware.

Transformed thereafter from an ahool skeptic to a first-hand ahool
“earwitness,” Bartels set about collecting details of other ahool
encounters for documentation, and eventually news of his endeavors reached
veteran cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, who became co-author of Bartels’s
above-cited Fate article.

The ahool was of special interest to Sanderson, because he too had
met with such a creature -- but not in Java. Instead, he had been in the company
of fellow naturalist Gerald Russell in the Assumbo Mountains of Cameroon, in
western Africa, collecting zoological specimens during the Percy Sladen
Expedition of 1932. As Sanderson recorded in his book Animal Treasure
(1937), he and Russell had been wading down a river one evening in search of
tortoises to add to their collection when, without any warning, a jet-black
creature with gigantic wings and a flattened, monkey-like face flew directly
toward him, its lower jaw hanging down and revealing itself to be unnervingly
well-stocked with very large white teeth. Sanderson hastily ducked down into the
water as this terrifying apparition skimmed overhead, then he and Russell fired
several shots at it as it soared back into view, but the creature apparently
escaped unscathed, wheeling swiftly out of range as its huge wings cut through
the still air with a loud hissing sound. Within a few moments, their menacing
visitor had been engulfed by the all-encompassing shadows of the night, and did
not return….